Revisiting A Few Small Repairs two decades on doesn’t feel like nostalgia so much as perspective catching up. For Shawn Colvin, the album’s 20th anniversary landed like a reminder of how long the road had already been before the world finally tuned in.
“Well, no—in a way, no,” Colvin says when asked if it feels like 20 years have passed. “But in another way, yeah, 20 years is kind of wild. It doesn’t seem like that long ago. But I’d already been doing this for a very long time—performing, making my living playing bars, being on the road—before I had a record deal. So relatively speaking, 20 years isn’t that long.”
That sense of relativity matters. A Few Small Repairs was Colvin’s fourth album, not a debut lightning strike. By the time it arrived, she’d already built something sturdy underneath herself. “I had the opportunity to develop a grassroots following and get my feet under me as a recording artist,” she says. “I remember going into making that record thinking, ‘We don’t care who likes this, or if radio plays it. We don’t expect a hit.’”
But then it happened. “So the irony,” Colvin adds with a laugh, “is that we got a hit.”
That hit—“Sunny Came Home”—has often been folded into shorthand narratives about the album: the ‘divorce record,’ the confessional breakthrough, the sudden mainstream moment. Colvin gently pushes back. “I think that’s something I maybe contributed to,” she admits. “But for the most part, the songs were pretty stream-of-consciousness. There are plenty of songs on there that have nothing to do with relationships—‘Sunny Came Home,’ ‘Wichita Skyline,’ ‘Suicide Alley,’ ‘New Thing Now.’”
Still, she understands why people look for hooks. “We can’t deny that some great divorce records have been made,” she says. “They do like to latch onto something.”
What mattered more to Colvin was the freedom baked into the process. Having stopped chasing radio entirely, she and producer John Leventhal leaned into instinct. “We especially went, ‘Let’s just have fun and not worry about any of it,’” she says. That mindset gave the album its cohesion—and its confidence.
Confidence didn’t make the aftermath any easier. Success has a way of rearranging expectations overnight. “Oh, I felt pressure,” Colvin says plainly about making the follow-up. “And it sucked. I’d had a baby—she was an infant—and I was completely immersed in that. I didn’t know what to write about. My life had changed tremendously, and I didn’t know how to express it.”
The Grammys, the hit, the sudden spotlight—it all collided with real life. “It was not a great alchemy,” she says. “It was hard.”
Looking back, Colvin recognizes the upside of arriving when she did. “I did have the luxury of having a past to fall back on,” she says. Years of touring, writing, and learning how to trust her own compass made the moment survivable.
That trust shows up in the album’s details—especially its sequencing. “Sequencing is important. It really is,” Colvin says. “Especially for those of us who remember side A and side B. How you start side two matters.” Listening now, the arc still holds, each song placed with intention rather than momentum.
And then there’s that opening mandolin figure—one of those intros that collapses time the moment it starts. “I’ve got to give a shout-out to John Leventhal,” Colvin says. “That mandolin part was not my idea. It was all him.”
Two decades on, A Few Small Repairs endures not because it chased relevance, but because it didn’t. Colvin is still writing, still working at her own pace, still letting songs arrive when they’re ready. The album didn’t freeze her in time—it just marked one moment when everything quietly aligned.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the trailer for the 20th Anniversary Edition below!
